Help!
Our floral journey has been painful. We have a very small budget for flowers and live in an expensive area so we had to eliminate a lot of florists based on costs. After a very difficult search, we found one within our budget, with excellent reviews on The Knot, WW and Yelp and with some awards. Yay.
We've paid the deposit the same day I found her Facebook page. (She has no Instagram, which I find surprising. Her website is also not good.) I looked and well, she takes terrible photos. At least, I think its just her photos and not her flowers? None of the photos are professional photos and most of them, the table isn't set etc. so the centerpieces look tiny but I can't tell if its because the table isn't set or the centerpieces are that small! Now I'm worried ours will be too small. The mirrored discs are not even always centered in her photos. I looked at the user submitted professional photos and they did look better. Honestly, some of her flowers aren't really my style. She's done a lot of color schemes that are nothing like mine but...it was what we could afford.
Also, in my email communications with her, I found she didn't really read everything very carefully. Her quotes reflected changes I made by phone but never reflects my attached notes (which are minor). I guess I have to just call her for everything but it drives me insane that she won't update her notes properly.
But...her customers seem happy so maybe she always pulls through?
Now I'm locked in and freaking out. I'm thinking about increasing our floral budget (which we can technically afford but it wasn't necessarily how I wanted to spend the money) to do taller centerpieces because it looked like she was better at those. I'm trying to think of little things I can do to make the flowers or the tables look better. More details, direction, increasing the size etc. Adding chargers or upgrading the silverware proved expensive so I'm thinking of asking her to increase the size of the centerpieces?
Anyone been in this situation with a vendor where you're doubting yourself after? What did you do?
